October 17, 2010

Last week the Student Forum held a contest for the Halloween poster, and of the group of pan-GSD entrants mine was voted the winner.

The concept was to create a "parametric zombie". Most of the GSD halloween posters feature some inside joke related to design culture or Gund Hall itself. I wanted to jokingly refer to the often nightmare-ish projects that often result from the indiscriminate use of tools like grasshopper. The Voronoi (until recently the coolest parametric geometry around) is used to both abstract the figure of the skull while evoking spider webs and fractured bone.

The poster was made using grasshopper's image sampler + an image of a skull. The image's luminosity was used as a boolean mask on a background grid of 2D points. Where the image was black, the corresponding point in the base grid was deleted. The next step was to jitter the points in the XY plane, and filter out more points randomly to create some differentiation. Lastly, the remaining points were plugged into the Voronoi component and offset slightly. The rest of the line/fill/text work was done through illustrator.

I had also played with varying the colors based on the area of the voronoi cells and then shuffling the results around to create a more playful composition. I stuck with the black/white poster - which hopefully will prove easier for Student Forum to print with consistency (and save on ink + $).